1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for measuring Internet Protocol (IP)-media video quality and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for measuring Quality of Experience (QoE) guaranteed IP-media video quality in real-time broadcasting over an IP network.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the development of information and communication technologies and the growth of the information superhighway, converged communications and broadcasting services have recently been introduced. In the case of a converged network, IP-based multimedia services are increasing more and more. For next-generation converged networks, Korea aims to operate a next generation convergence network (NGcN) or a broadband convergence network (BcN) in an IP-based scheme.
Typical examples of IP media, which are offered over such an IP-based network, include video data broadcast over IPTV or voice data on Internet phones. Such an IP network, however, offers best effort services, thus not guaranteeing Quality of Service (QoS). Therefore, data congestion or traffic trouble due to increasing user numbers causes packet loss or error insertion, resulting in poor services. In particular, a substantial increase in the number of TCP/IP and UDP/IP networks due to a growth of IPTV would lead to a poor IP-based service quality. In this case, it would be necessary to assess a multimedia service quality in order to suspend the service or apply an appropriate charge for the service based on quality.
To assess video quality, an objective measurement method and a subjective measurement method have conventionally been used. The objective measurement method is classified into full reference (FR) measurement, reduced reference (RR) measurement, and no reference (NR) measurement, depending on whether there is an original video available. FR measurement and RR measurement use an original video, thus guaranteeing a reliable measurement, but such measurements are difficult to perform in real time. NR measurement does not use an original video, thus not guaranteeing a reliable measurement. Traditional methods for video matching use undamaged original video and target video and are thus not appropriate for an IP-media environment where damaged videos may cause errors.